Tony Blair often bemoans the lack of clear enemies who can be used to help define his New Labour project - but not this week, when he was beset by enemies, some on his own side, at Labour's 101st conference.

One Labour MP heading home from Brighton last night called them the "four Ps", as in petrol protests, hostile polls, pensions - and personalities, those egotistical ministerial colleagues (and officials) whose indiscretions had surfaced in eve of conference books.

Some of those indiscretions may have been the result of naivety, but others were mere score settling. Few people are involved, but the damage is disproportionate.

Yet the Blairites and their allies, including the feuding Browns and Mandelsons, left the conference in good heart despite the buffeting they got - indeed partly because of it. Labour activists and Labour voters could be under no illusion now, they explained. The election was coming, and another thumping Labour victory could not be assumed.

By Wednesday afternoon the conference had acquired a nostalgic air for everyone old enough to remember Labour conferences in their fratricidal prime, the late 1970s and the 1980s. Hotel huddles between ministers and TUC chiefs, elaborate verbal compromises and a riveting conference debate on pensions between Labour's heart and its head.

But shrewder insiders noted the dogs that did not bark, or barked politely. The GMB union's John Edmonds may have enjoyed rebuking the cabinet from the rostrum; Unison's Rodney Bickerstaffe plainly did not.

As for rank and file delegates, few attacked the motives and performance of ministers or even criticised their mutual backbiting in the media.

"This isn't the old conference," said one cabinet veteran of Neil Kinnock's long march back to electability. "The conference knows the value of having a Labour government; they like knowing that it can get things done."

Despite the first negative polls, there was more unity than recrimination. The prevailing mood was sober but not panicky. The polls, many delegates say are a blip, a necessary kick in the shins.

So ministers have been given time to get the pensions formula right and to be ready to deal with renewed blockades of oil refineries if they happen.

One senior minister said: "We've been through a trough and we're coming out of it. Our people now know they're going to have to fight for victory."

All Labour conferences are aimed at two very different audiences: the activists and trade unions who hold the party together, and the wider electorate watching on TV. With the election probably seven months away, the 2000 conference repeatedly showed ministers juggling both.

Mr Blair's sweaty speech included passages that were more Old Labour than in recent years - the list of dodgy things "I cannot do" to win votes, for example.

But it was also calibrated to convince sceptical voters of what Labour has already done - for jobs, schools, hospitals - and what its huge spending programme (the patient fruit of Gordon Brown's economic prudence) will do for public services, provided William Hague's cynical tax cutting pledges are not allowed to ruin it. Loyalists in Downing Street believe the formula will work, as Labour candidates hammer away at the spine chilling message that £24m worth of cuts would have to be found in every constituency.

They do not mind a few conference setbacks as the party questions the government's wisdom on pensions or train safety. "The overlap between government and party policy making had become too close, the unity thing had gone too far," one official said yesterday.

That calm judgment assumes that voters will accept the government's case for a targeted pension policy, not the unions' call for high flat rate increases. As with the tax on petrol, the evidence of the polls is not encouraging.

Blair and Brown believe that when voters are confronted with the hard choices on tax cuts or better schools they will re-elect Labour. Warier ministers worry that they underestimate the extent to which a disaffected electorate has stopped listening.

Hence this week's efforts to find a way of explaining what the government has done in three years without sounding arrogant or complacent.

John Reid, the Scottish secretary, made a good shot at finding the right tone in a speech yesterday which lambasted the cynics, reactionaries and pundits who treat politics like a soap opera.

"We don't claim that we have done everything _ But we do claim this: that there is more opportunity, more security, more people with a better chance in life after three short years of this government."